SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals’ Organization, now offers three different SEM courses.  Last week, the SEMPO Institute announced the launch of its Paid Search-focused third course “Advanced Search Advertising.”  This course includes 13 modules: An Evolving Opportunity, PPC Models, Keywords & Campaign, Copywriting for Ads, Bidding & Ranking, Landing Pages, Success Metrics, PPC Program Specifics, Reporting & Analytics, I.P. - Click Fraud - SPAM, Alternative PPC Search Engines, Feeds & Feed Advertising, and Branding & Campaign.

The courses are designed for people that have completed the Fundamentals of Search Advertising Course, which is a prerequisite.  Bulk discounts are available for organizations that want to send multiple employees through the self-paced online curriculum.  With the increasing shortage of SEM-trained individuals, these courses offer the opportunity for traditional marketing specialists as well as designers and developers the chance to become proficient in the basics of both Paid and Organic Search.

SEMPO President Jeff Pruitt offered his thoughts: “Advanced Search Advertising gives marketers the ability to get more return on their ad buys by providing them with a deeper level of strategy as well as hands-on tactics they can implement.  The class is the most comprehensive one available to marketers and it comes at a time when online advertising is growing in importance. At the same time, these ad budgets are being scrutinized closely so providing more ROI is essential.”  Avenue A | Razorfish wrote courses for both the Advanced Search Advertising and the Advanced SEO modules.  Further information is available at the SEMPO Institute training center information page.

One of the long-time mantras in the SEO world, both from the perspective of the Search Engines as well as many leading SEO practitioners, is that there is nothing that a competitor can do to harm your rankings.  As outlined recently by Barry Schwartz at the Search Engine Roundtable, this discussion has been going on for years.  In fact, Google has a specific FAQ page revolving around the subject: 

“What can I do if I'm afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?”
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

According to a recent article at Forbes, The Saboteurs of Search, there are in fact some organizations which claim to be able to damage the rankings of a competitor. The article focuses on tactics outlined by one U.K. SEO, Brendon Scott, who actually owns a blog called “SEO Assassin.” The tactics involve off-page SEO techniques that can be used to help a website - primarily focused on link-building - being used to help to create “bad links” to a competitor.  This helps to devalue the site from the point of view of a search engine algorithm that relies on inbound links to a website to help it determine the “trust” the community has in a particular site.

One respected SEO has commented at Search Engine Roundtable, saying that many in the industry have blindly believed Google over the years in regards to this idea that one cannot do damage to a competitor’s site.  In fact, he relates it to an ostrich hiding its head in the sand: 

“Sorry to come over as a bit of a spoilsport but there's a blatant mix of naiveté and faulty logic that's been dominating this discourse for years… Guess what will happen if your squeaky clean organic site on toddler apparel suddenly gets hit with tens of thousands of links coming from domains of the "(edited-out name of ED drug)- (Edited out name of male body part)-enlargement-cheap-cheap-cheap-non-prescription-drugs.info" ilk? Tons of them? Each and every day, sustained over say 3 to 4 weeks?”

The AA | RF SEO team will monitor for any such tactics occurring by keeping track of inbound links to a client’s site or sites.  The team will not engage in any tactics to try and harm competitor rankings – instead focusing on only “white hat” search engine-approved SEO best practices.

Is Paid Search Overrated? – As reported in the New York Post, London-based Internet Search Management (also called Internet Search Metrics) last week was slated to release search audits indicating most executives overspend on SEM. While "overspend” is an exaggeration, and calling Paid Search ads "one of the worst-spent marketing dollars on the internet" is obviously a gross over-generalization, and possibly pure balderdash to any experienced marketer, the article accurately noted SEO is sometimes an underinvested channel. 

Any holistic online marketing approach should include both SEM and SEO. Testing to find the optimal balance between the two is one of the services provided to AA | RF clients.  SMTrends will cover this article in more detail sometime during the next few weeks.  In the meantime, please read Frank Schilling’s thoughts.

eBay Launches Kijiji in U.S. –  Described by some as a legitimate Craigslist competitor, eBay has launched Kijiji in the U.S.  This is yet another online classifieds space that marketers should be aware of, and perhaps utilize should the demographics of the Kijiji users tend to sway towards the particular organization.  For more information, see Greg Sterling’s post at the Search Engine Journal.